It has become increasingly common for website operators to collect revenue from advertisers, based on how many times that visitors to the websites click on advertisements presented in connection with the website. In many cases, the websites openly encourage their visitors to click or otherwise responds to the ads presented on behalf of the advertisers, in an effort to increase revenues and profitability. The industry often refers to this website advertising model as the “pay-per-click” model. Under this model, the advertiser pays some amount for each click received from website visitors.
Current implementations of the pay-per-click model may not distinguish between different visitors to the website, in terms of how likely the visitors may be to conduct transactions with the advertisers. For example, well-qualified visitors who are highly likely to purchase goods or services from the advertiser are treated the same as casual visitors who are unlikely to purchase at all. Thus, the advertisers may pay the same amount to receive a click from the well-qualified visitors as they do for clicks from casual visitors. This circumstance may reduce the attractiveness of the pay-per-click model to potential advertisers.
Another concern with conventional pay-per-click models is click fraud, which refers to the practice of artificially and maliciously inflating the number of clicks reported on advertisements presented in connection with websites. Click fraud is an ongoing issue, particularly to advertisers who may be exposed to excessive charges resulting from fraudulently-inflated click counts. If left unchecked over time, click fraud may cause advertisers to reconsider advertising on websites, to the detriment of website operators who may stand to lose this revenue stream from the advertisers.